Let's Name Him
by bluestargem
Summary: WARNING: MAJOR MOCKINGJAY SPOILERS INSIDE./ Chap. 1 - Annie remembers./ A collection of Finnick & Annie moments.


_**WARNING: MAJOR MOCKINGJAY SPOILERS.**__ Don't say I didn't warn you now._

**_Disclaimer: I do not own the Hunger Games Trilogy. Never have, never will._**

_**A/N:** Feel free to shoot me in a review after this, 'cause I know I deserve it. D:_

_For the Starvation Forum, prompt was __**broken**__. I may do some minor editing later since this was really last minute writing :P __I know Annie actually seems sane after Finnick's death, but well, I don't agree with that. So I'm going to twist SuCo's words a little so that this still (hopefully) fits in with canon. ;D And yes, the style is meant to be like that - a miserable attempt at imitating Annie's mind._

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_**-Let's Name Him-**_

She doesn't know why she is here, or how she got here, lying in this bed in a room of such blinding white and cleanliness. She knows she doesn't want to be here though, because the blank walls are too white and too close and she feels too trapped – it feels like she is drowning in a sea of white sheets and white blankets and white curtains. And people come into the room too often, people in white coats – doctors, they say – but she doesn't feel sick so why is she here? But the thought goes away soon enough and so she just waits there in the bed, wondering when she will be leaving this place as she observes the people coming into the room, coming and going, and some, she notices, never return.

And that thought makes her feel quite sick and she feels her throat tightening as an elusive memory snags at the edges of her mind, a memory of a person she is waiting for, of a person who hasn't returned yet. She tries to grasp it, lunges, snatches, but her fingers only close on air and this feeling of forever hovering on the tip of remembering is making her hands all clammy and slippery. She thinks distantly that maybe she _is_ sick and that is why she is here, in a room where the tide of people ebb and flow like waves, where so many don't come back.

One day, a woman with a doll-like face and pretty blonde hair comes to her room and sits beside her bed, talking softly to her. Annie catches words like _remember_ and _Finnick_ and _not coming back_ but she doesn't understand her. So she gazes vaguely at the woman's face instead and finds she quite likes her eyes – they are blue and somehow familiar, but much too bright, like a lake when it catches the moonlight at night. But they look so sad even though they are so pretty. She wonders why and she thinks that she will ask.

"Why are your eyes so sad?"

The woman's lips stop moving then, the words faltering in her mouth. The room becomes so much quieter all of a sudden. And then the lake water in the woman's eyes spill over and runs down her cheeks and Annie realises that those are tears in the woman's too bright eyes and she's _crying_ and then the woman turns away, out of the room, and Annie thinks that maybe she shouldn't ask the woman that again.

The doll-faced woman with too bright eyes always comes back though and Annie learns to wait for her to come and talk to her softly about things she doesn't understand. Except that's okay because the woman's voice is nice to listen to, and reminds her of swishing waves and gentle breezes and as long as she doesn't ask the woman questions like _what do I have to remember?_ and _what baby?_ and _who's Finnick?_, the woman's tears won't escape from her eyes.

And besides, sometimes the woman comes with a little baby boy resting in her arms, and she would put the little baby in a cot beside the bed and let Annie look at it. The boy is pretty, very pretty, and she likes it when it's asleep. But when it's awake, it looks at her with those pretty, sparkly sea foam eyes and she doesn't like it then because they are like bits of a past she doesn't remember and it makes her heart ache so strangely that she is quite glad when they take it away afterwards.

When the doll-faced woman with the too bright eyes comes to visit her again, she tells the woman that and the woman whispers _oh Annie, don't you remember Finnick at all? _but Annie doesn't understand who this Finnick is – she never does. The word just reverberates around in her blank mind, soft-edged and honey sweet, so tantalisingly familiar, tugging and coaxing her mind to remember a memory she doesn't know, _can't _know, and so she squeezes her eyes shut and screams instead until she can feel nothing anymore.

_There were two people in the room. A tearful girl and a handsome boy, wrapped desperately in each other's arms – _

_The handsome boy who whispered _let's name our baby something special _–_

_The tearful girl whose fingers curled over her stomach protectively -"you'll come back in time for the birth, right?" _

_The whispered words of the boy - "of course Annie. Of course."_

When she opens her eyes again, the light is piercing and her throat feels thick and dry. There are a lot of people in the room now, swirling around with clipboards, writing, muttering, but then they are gone and the woman with the too bright blue eyes appears before her with a glass of water. Annie tells her the dream first though and the woman seems excited.

"What else do you remember? What else do you dream?"

Annie dreams of scary and frightening things too, not of the handsome boy who always holds her. She dreams of floating bodies and rolling heads and a cold numb feeling spreading through her limbs, of choking on water that tastes of blood and mud and death that would never ever go away. She dreams of heavy limbs weighed down and helpless flailing, of screaming until there is nothing left to scream with and the feeling of endless, infinite _panic. _But she doesn't say any of this, just shakes her head and clenches her fingers.

The woman looks sad again now, disappointed, and she doesn't say anything else, but Annie is shivering, shaking, from the dreams, even though she isn't dreaming now and so she thinks of the nice boy in her dream and his arms and his _let's name our baby something special _and she feels a bit better now.

But soon, Annie dreams of other things as well and they aren't such broken dreams anymore.

"_And Finnick would too if he were here."_

_Johanna glanced at her, eyes cold. _

"_But he isn't because Snow's mutts killed him," she snapped, impatience biting at her voice._

_Annie's lips trembled for a moment, her hand coming to rest protectively on her stomach, as if by instinct. She felt herself shake beneath her fingers, felt her mind being swallowed by that all-consuming, dreaded panic that she had fought off so hard for their baby - until this moment._

_Around her, no one noticed._

The doll-faced woman with the too bright eyes is almost always with her now, and tells her stories now, stories that Annie can understand. She learns about the woman's daughters, a black-haired warrior and a golden-haired princess. She learns about the woman's handsome prince, her only, and lost, love. She learns about the woman's unshed tears in those lake-filled eyes, about her loss and her hope, her despair, her strength and it almost conjures up those things that only ever hovered on the edge of remembrance.

At night, when the woman is gone, Annie thinks about the hopeful fairytale of the black-haired girl who fought, and the golden-haired girl who healed, and the prince who died and she tries to reach those memories hovering just out of her reach, but she can't still, and she tries to swallow down the panic...

"_Annie," Nurse Everdeen whispered, as if trying not to wake anyone. "Why are you still awake?"_

_Annie looked up from her book. "Waiting for Finnick of course," she said and smiled. "Don't worry about me, Ms Everdeen. You can go back to sleep."_

_Something flickered in Ms Everdeen's widened blue eyes and she bit her lip. Stepping into the room, she walked over and sat on the bed, gently taking the book away from Annie's hands._

"_I think- I think you should go to sleep now Annie," she said, hesitant. "You need to stay healthy for the baby. Finnick would want that, wouldn't he?"_

_Annie looked at her mildly. "Of course. That's why he's coming back as soon as he can. And then we'll think of a special name for the baby."_

_For a moment, Nurse Everdeen merely looked at her, an unfathomable expression on her face. Then, eyes glittering and overbright, she nodded, touched Annie's cheek once, and walked out of the room silently._

The doll-faced woman comes to her room in the morning, and Annie stares at her, looking at those too bright blue eyes and the tears that never come down.

"Is your name Ms Everdeen?" she asks.

The woman faces her, and her blue eyes widen. But then Annie notices that she has brought the pretty baby again and focuses on it instead. It is awake this time, looking straight back at her piercingly with those sparkly sea foam eyes and they look so _familiar, _and she wants to remember –

_Pain – the worst possible kind – tore at her and she was crying like she had never cried before, her sobbing screams begging for a person who was no longer part of this world. It felt like a haze of colours and noises and nothing but pain and that panic was consuming her mind with its darkness again-_

_And then she heard another cry, unfamiliar and definitely not from her, and then...nothing._

The memory darts through her mind like those little silver fish in the ocean, quick and fleeting, a mere blur of colour before it vanishes. But it was too fast, and now her throat closes up and her hands twist the blankets with panic, because she knows she has forgotten something _so important _but she can't remember. _Can't can't can't_, she chants, and claps her hands to her head, trying to shake it all away.

The woman gently takes her hands away, and whispers calming things about princesses and warriors until Annie opens her eyes again. The woman smiles comfortingly; then bites her lip.

"What do you think we should name him?" she asks gently, putting the baby in its cot.

Annie smiles, previous moment forgotten, wondering why this woman is asking her this because it isn't _her_ baby and it isn't right to name another person's baby. So she says "something special" because someone said that to her before and she likes it-

_What do you think we should name him?_

_Something special..._

_Special..._

-liked it because someone said it before-

_Let's name our baby something special._

Annie gasps -the panic in her mind again, trying to remember, to reach the memory that is darting through the waters now, skimming the surface, and she catches glimpses of it-

_A pair of blue-green eyes-_

_Flowers on a white wedding cake-_

_A whispered promise- _

_Strong fingers around hers-_

_Hugs-_

_Tearful goodbyes-_

_Kisses-_

_I love you..._

Finnick.

One word, one image, one man, and her world has broken, exploded. It is like glass shattering, letting out all the vacuumed air it has sucked in, and the sharp pieces give way to release her into the air, out of the glass cage that her mind was, throwing her into reality. The clear memories come swamping into her mind and she feels like she's floating and _breathing _and she _understands_, filled with words and images and touches of Finnick, Finnick, Finnick and-

_Let's name our baby something special. _

She doesn't know if it's a good feeling or not, and there are many things still hazy, and her mind wants to know more, but the doll-faced woman – it _is _Ms Everdeen - laughs with such pure delight as she dances round the room, saying words like _first step _and _signs of recovery _that Annie thinks that it must be okay then.

_Let's name our baby something special._

And when she looks at the boy with the sparkly sea foam eyes now, it doesn't hurt so much.

So she picks him up from the cot and presses him to her chest and she thinks that she wants to hold him like that forever.

_Yes let's, Finnick._

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**A/N: **'_Kay, you can shoot me now and tell me how crap it is. Just be nice about it, yeah? :P But do review even if you didn't like it!_

_Btw, there will probably be more Finnick/Annie moments to come after this :) They won't be in order. _


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